The Real Deal Miami

Nightingale pays $80M for Miami Beach’s Lincoln Place office building

UPDATED Jan. 5, 12:15 p.m.: In yet another high-profile investment deal at the end of the year, the Nightingale Group just bought Miami Beach’s Lincoln Place office building for $80 million.

The purchase works out to roughly $571 per square foot for the seller, Cousins Properties, an Atlanta real estate investment trust that acquired the property as part of a merger in August.

Located right off Lincoln Road at 1601 Washington Avenue, the mixed-use building is known as the Miami headquarters of LNR Partners, a special servicer of commercial mortgage-backed securities. The company occupies all 110,000 square feet of the building’s offices, and subleases its 30,000 square feet of retail space.

Commercial brokerage NGKF’s Michael Lapointe, Michael Lohmann and Clay Sidner brought Nightingale to the deal. On the seller’s side was Chris Lee of CBRE.

Lapointe told The Real Deal that this is a long-term purchase for New York-based Nightingale, which is banking on rising commercial property values in South Beach. LNR’s lease on the building has four more years until it expires in January 2021, at which point Nightingale could try to persuade LNR into extending or squeeze more value out of Lincoln Place by bringing on multiple tenants.

Meridian Capital Group said it arranged $62.3 million in acquisition financing for the purchase of the ground lease on behalf of Nightingale. The three-year, LIBOR-based floating-rate loan, provided by Pine River Capital Management, features full-term interest-only payments and two one-year extension options. The financing was negotiated by Meridian Senior Managing Directors, Ronnie Levine and Abe Hirsch, who are both based in the company’s New York City headquarters.

Lincoln Place’s last outright sale was in 2013, when Parkway Properties bought the building from LNR for $66 million and leased it back to the special servicer. Cousins stepped into the picture earlier this year when the company merged with Parkway in a deal valued at $1.95 billion.

The deal with Nightingale had been in the works as far back as 18 months ago, when the building was still owned by Parkway, Lapointe said. The merger threw a wrench into the deal, however.

But the long wait turned out to be a boon for Nightingale, he said. The firm ended up scoring a “significantly” better price on the property after several other deals fell through. Nightingale paid all-cash for Lincoln Place, Lapointe said, though the company may take out financing in the near future.

Nightingale also owns four commercial condominiums on Lincoln Road, which it bought for $28 million in 2014.